Bitcode

Bitcode is an intermediate representation of a compiled binary. Including bitcode will allow Apple to reoptimize your app binary in the future without the need for you to submit a new version of your app to the store. PSPDFKit for iOS has been built with bitcode since version 5. Bitcode is also one of the largest factors in the size of our SDK.

Bitcode is just another form of LLVM IR, which is architecture dependent. PSPDFKit ships with bitcode slices for armv7 and arm64.

Some articles will recommend searching for bitcode. However, LLVM is a much better indicator of the existence of bitcode.

Stripping Bitcode

Xcode 7.2 added a new tool called bitcode_strip to remove bitcode chunks from binaries:

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$ xcrun bitcode_strip -r PSPDFKit -o PSPDFKit

Removing bitcode will disallow Apple to run binary optimizations on your behalf. You can verify that it worked by checking the file size — which should be significantly smaller than the original file — or by using otool as shown above.

BCSymbolMaps

A BCSymbolMap is a lot like a dSYM for bitcode. Xcode builds it as part of creating the app binary, and also for every dynamic framework. It's required for re-symbolicating function/method names to understand crashers. Symbol maps are per architecture, so there are currently two (armv7 and arm64) in PSPDFKit. You can learn more in the Framework Size article.